Getting (Anti-) Social, the Web 2.0 Way

The timing, it would seem, couldn’t be better. With blogger extraordinaire Robert Scoble regularly complaining about being limited to 5,000 “friends” in Facebook, the Boston Globeran a refreshing piece over the weekend about two relatively new (anti-) social apps that both “aim to put the hate back into online networking.”

“People are yearning to express the ridiculousness of some of the features of Facebook — having all these friends that aren’t genuine,” MIT doctoral student and creator of Enemybook Kevin Matulet told the Globe. “For some people, Enemybook is about expressing their distaste for political figures or celebrities. And for other people, it actually is about spreading hatred for their despised co-workers and exes,” he continues.

Enemybook itself is a software application that sits in Facebook and lets you highlight nemeses on your personal page in order to facilitate the disconnecting process. But Enemybook is only one of a new breed of software applications attempting to point out the frequent absurdity of online friendships forged in the Web 2.0 “eveybody’s connected” cauldron.

Snubster, another web site that encourages people to undermine and mock online social communities, got its start in 2006 and allows users to alienate each other by putting people “On Notice” or listing them as “Dead to Me.” While Snubster actually has its own site, it also recently launched Facebook application.

Says Matulef of Enemybook: “It seems worth pointing out that Facebook was initially developed at Harvard; MIT had to counter with something.”